


A Balm in Gilead

by Tammany



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Gentleness, Love, M/M, Quiet, Secret Squirrels, Sweet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-25
Updated: 2015-02-25
Packaged: 2018-03-15 01:37:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3433208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Beware. I seemed to be in a righteously sentimental mood tonight--and further, wanted to explore reversal of expected roles through Greg's eyes again. I've said before, sometimes I like to take the generally assumed dynamic of Greg/Mycroft and turn it around, show how it also might play a different way. In this case, I played with the common framing of Greg as the warm, feeling, grounded, emotionally fluent one, and Mycroft as the dependent Ice Man who needs Greg to unlock the heart. But it seems to me it could be the reverse--at least from Greg's POV. </p><p>So. Greg basking in the warmth of his lover's presence.</p><p>And did I warn you it was sappy? Well, it is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Balm in Gilead

Hardly anyone knows Greg and Mycroft have a relationship…not even their formal, work-only relationship. That’s one of the gotcha elements of their respective professions. Secret squirrels are secret—no one knows where you keep your nuts, if they aren’t even aware you’re a squirrel.

Which Mycroft is always quick to point out is kind of the point. They are the secret-est of secret squirrels, each hiding one precious, special nut from the eyes of a wicked world.

Mycroft relishes the levels of punning involved in that entire metaphor. He loves suggesting they are both nuttier than a Georgia peanut farm. He loves the hidden little hint of testicular defense…protecting their nuts. He loves them both being scramble-witted, silly squirrels.

Greg has seen him sitting in the office at Whitehall—the boring, “minor position in government” office that looks out over the Horse Guards Parade and across the road to St. James Park. Mycroft will gaze, face flat and expressionless—and then, suddenly, his eyes will light, and laughter will shine. Greg knows that if he’s quick enough he’ll turn and spot a scamper of motion on the beaten earth of the parade, or along the pavement under the trees at the edge of the park. Squirrels…

He’ll know that for that bright, laughing second Mycroft thought of the two of them: the secret squirrels, hiding their treasured relationship in plain sight.

It’s easier than you might think. They’re both busy men. Both reserved. They have areas of plausible overlapping interests, even taking into account the fact that both are covert operatives with separate careers as cover. But Mycroft’s government work overlaps Lestrade’s detective and administrative work—especially when the Met is using him as the front man with the press. And there’s always Sherlock. Now they’re both single and alone—and they both live in worlds where three points of overlap is as good a social bond as any.

They work together just often enough to justify their being seen together occasionally otherwise.

Climbing into Mycroft’s eternal black Jaguar limos.

Eating at the sort of spot that is nice, but not so expensive as it pretends to be—the common grazing ground of men with positions like theirs… Nice enough to live up to the image they’re trying to promote, and modest enough to spare the limited salaries they actually receive. British Civil Servants are hardly known for their lush salaries, no matter what the Bond movies try to suggest.

Those little flashes of public association give two experts such as themselves all the room they need to then bootstrap to far less public weekends together, evenings sharing a bed, weekday mornings zooming around a single flat like Ferris Buehler on his day off, tossing each other socks and deodorant and making up tea so they each can skip out to work on time in spite of having slept in disastrously late.

It helps that so much of their lives are lived online—and that Mycroft knows how to hide the fact that their respective devices are operating within inches of each other. They watch movies together on a shared tablet while snarfing down tuna-mayonnaise sandwiches tossed together to make up for days too busy for regular meals. Or Mycroft researches yet another long and complex set of social connections among Eastern European potentates while Lestrade sprawls across the bed, using Mycroft’s stomach as a pillow while he reads an ebook on his own tablet, playing MP3s of his favorite new R&B vocalists. He’s trying to sell Mycroft on Adele and Emelie Sande—big, bold voices like audio fever-dreams.

Mycroft listens. He wrinkles his nose—that long ibis nose—and rolls his eyes, and makes juvenile comments about how overwrought it all is. But he listens, and as he does he strokes Greg’s hair. Greg gleefully lines up another song. Amy Winehouse, this time…anything to keep Mycroft there, leaning with his back braced against the headboard, hand stroking over Greg’s cropped scalp. Anything to let Greg stay there looking up at his lover. Mycroft closes his eyes, leans back, listens. He winces. He laughs. His brows fly up and his mouth twists…and every so often something catches him, and it’s like having another instrument join the orchestra.

“Kill the Boy,” did it—the acoustic version. Emelie Sande, singing a song about a woman’s thoughts as she considers having to tell her lover she’s betrayed him. Perhaps that she’s leaving him. The agony of her own fear and remorse and dismay. The looming agony of her lover’s loss. Greg Lestrade, alone among all the world, has witnessed “Kill the Boy” sung by Emelie Sande and accompanied by Mycroft Holmes’ subtle, haunted empathic reaction. The flicker of his lashes on the folds of his closed lids, the tightening of his mouth, the slow match of his breath to the demanding rhythms of the song.

Greg’s lover knows about walking around with “a bullet on his tongue.” He’s gone armed with assassin words. He’s set the words free, seen them fly home and stop hearts cold.

Greg never stops being amazed at the depth of the man. The complexity—and the generosity. A greedy man would make confession a million times. Beg forgiveness. Share the guilt around, pouring it out onto every silent beneficiary of his decisions.

The very, very few people who know about Greg and Mycroft—who know about the weekends and the evenings and the mornings with the tea and the socks and the Ferris Buehler manic laughter—think Greg’s the one who brings humanity to Mycroft. Brings him warmth. Anchors him. Even Mycroft seems to believe it, to Greg’s surprise.

Of all people—Mycroft should know better.

Greg lies with his head pillowed on Mycroft’s soft stomach—just a little too soft, by some people’s standards, but perfect by Greg’s. He’s watched Mycroft for hours. For years. He knows, if no one else does…

Greg spends his life playing a complicated role. Bluff. Aware but hardly oversensitive. Hardy. Masculine. British. A good sport. Not a man without feeling—but never a man who’d be considered soft.

He’s survived so much, and met it with a grin, a joke, a shrug. Or an oath and a vicious kick to a rear tyre. He’s flirted in the safe, sexless way of rough workplaces—all sound and sass, without sensuality or desire. He’s stood in a divorce court, alone, as a judge ended a marriage he’d once thought would be his anchor in a storm, his safe haven. He’s been suspended—and brought back. He’s lived calmly between ambiguities, with a friend who was dead…unless he wasn’t.

He’s a good, solid man.

But it is only when he sees the shadow of Mycroft’s lashes shiver in time with Emelie Sande’s voice, that he can feel the depth of the song’s sorrow. It’s only when Mycroft’s hand strokes over his short, velvet-napped hair that he can let himself feel the sensuous pleasure of his own body’s reaction. It’s only when he meets Mycroft’s laughing blue eyes, and sees the flirt of a squirrel’s tail across the road, that he can truly delight in the wonderful joke of the two secret squirrels, and their beloved hidden nuts.

It’s Mycroft who makes Greg human, he thinks. Not the other way around.

The MP3 changes on the player. Old, now—Mahalia Jackson. “There is a Balm in Gilead.”

Mycroft shakes his head, turns it off. Too sweet. Too painful. Too close to home.

His hand strokes over Greg’s head, tender and soft—and the song plays on between them anyway—and between them, each heals the other’s soul. Two nuts together.


End file.
